February 3, 2012

The Roman numerals got hard to read quite a while ago, but getting to the simple "L" for 50 is going to look weirder than any of the elaborate configurations of letters we've had to puzzle over — or ignore — in recent years.

59 comments:

The official NFL logo will most likely be a 50, or they may not call it Superbowl Fifty at all in their presentation, but rather the 50th Anniversary or something similar. On the other hand, a lot of the more clever advertising and marketing will use "L" to great effect.

I don't pay attention to something like that. Its a pretentious marketing device. I might remember or care about a particular game looking back based on the teams involved (e.g. SF vs CINN) but not so much the year it occurred and not in any way the Roman number.

In keeping with the Superbowl musical tradition of appropriating outdated acts and stale, superseded pop culture, I would suggest they go with Superbowl Fiddy. This hip hop term for "fifty" is current now but will be a bit stale by then, but that won't stop the Superbowl's mainstay customers, aging white corporate types, from feeling wonderfully multicultural, young and trendy when they tell their friends, "Ima gon' Superbowl Fiddy, yo."

Good grief. This isn't brain surgery or rocket science. But it does fit in quite well with the modern world of oh-so-smart people who are so brilliant as to be confounded at the most obvious things and to make complex what is exceedingly simple.

Let's try binary: 0110010.Or, some other great bases - how about 20 Base 25? But, then we can view L as being base 50, which should do us for the next 40 or so years (until we have to start maybe doing XC for SB 90), which is fine for most of us, because I doubt if I will still be around then.

I'm waiting for Super Bowl LVI (56) in ten years as it will feature a halftime show of nothing but Elvis impersonators ("Elvi" being the plural of "Elvis"), or at least have the Patriots back in it, as their current logo looks like they're supposed to be the Flying Elvi.

This year (XLVI) is just for former Elvis impersonators. (Hmmm... could that be considered a slam on Madonna?)

I'd hire Newt Gingrich, who will be back working as an influence peddlar in the private sector and tossing out Big, Bold Ideas to sell books on the side with Callista or new wife number IV, to come up with a suitably Grandiose monniker.

Perhaps the "Half Century of Greatness Game".

Reinvent the whole name. As historian, Newt can lecture that "Bowl" has 19th century roots and Nietzsche, also in the 19th century, took "super" from a scientific term to throwing it on aspects of man and society as a word popularizer.

No more super, no more "bowl". Toilets and kitchens have "bowls". The players aren't bowlers.

"The Game That Starts the American Renaissance" Because the Game is cosmically, profoundly, fundamentally important to Who We Are!

I'd hire Newt Gingrich, who will be back working as an influence peddlar in the private sector and tossing out Big, Bold Ideas to sell books on the side with Callista or new wife number IV, to come up with a suitably Grandiose monniker.

Perhaps the "Half Century of Greatness Game".

Reinvent the whole name. As historian, Newt can lecture that "Bowl" has 19th century roots and Nietzsche, also in the 19th century, took "super" from a scientific term to throwing it on aspects of man and society as a word popularizer.

No more super, no more "bowl". Toilets and kitchens have "bowls". The players aren't bowlers.

"The Game That Starts the American Renaissance" Because the Game is cosmically, profoundly, fundamentally important to Who We Are!

If, instead of Newt, we went with an out of office Barack or some other profound liberal thinker we could have a Game that celebrates a victim du jour, or past victim person or group, because victimhood and Oprahfication means you simply cannot go overboard in showing "caring and empathy" for victims.

1. The Breast Cancer Awareness Bowl.2. Yet Another Needed Event For the Hero Victim Families of 9/11 and Katrina.3. Shrug and go for what liberals and Dem constituency groups really want - rename it "The Martin Luther King Bowl" - and hold it in a depressed and crime ridden city where half the schools, housing projects, and streets have "MLK" names or associations.

It will have to be a really impressive L. It should be formed of a bald equal which will descend from the top right corner of the screen to alight next to SUPER BOWL, don a football uniform, position itself as though about to pitch to a quarterback (also presumably avian), but then instead morph into an L that looks as though it's made of metal. After the viewer has time to read SUPER BOWL [impressive] L, the whole thing will explode into a shower of metallic, patriotic spangles.

I just learned that 49 will be XLIX. I thought it might IL, which would be pretty cool except Chicago would want to host it. I like Chicago, but I don't like its mayor or its current, most famous citizen splitting time betwixt Chitown and DC.

Good (and funny!) answers earlier, folks (and thanks for the Monty Python laugh), but more seriously, there is one thing the Romans did that's particularly appropriate for America and Americans: Stoicism-inspired (not Christian inspired) Roman jurists — and not the U.S. founding fathers — invented the legal maxim that “All men are equal.”